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Friday, April 8, 2011

Pitch critique --
We'll have a look at everyone's ideas and suggest ways to simplify or enhance the scenes.

nothing is as weird as reality

Importing video to Flash: there's more than one way to do this. I've found image sequences work best. Use QT, Premiere or another program to create an image sequence and load it into Flash. We'll practice this in class.

Next .. Walk Cycles:
The walk cycle is a tricky but basic part of every animation curriculum. You're going to learn the nuts-and-bolts of bipedal locomotion, and try to apply them to your character. (There's also walk cycle info in the posts for DESN 2022.)

We'll get a start on our walk cycles in class and also have a look at some beautiful 2D reference from some of the masters of animation who really pushed the medium to the limit.

Homework:
Continue to work on your final project and finish up the walk cycle for your character. Don't use tweening or symbols -- draw all the frames (at 12 fps) and see what tricks you can use to keep things consistent. If your character is not bipedal, come up with a creative way to show locomotion, demonstrating gravity's effects as a traditional walk would.

We'll parent the Geo to the rig & test everthing to make sure it's all working.
Next step: Renaming using a standard protocol
A few housekeeping tasks and your Luxo is done.
Get the rig all ready for animation being sure to lock and hide non-keyable channels and set up display layers.
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On to our next challenge -- The Leg

A leg is a lot like an upside-down Luxo.
How do we create the correct behaviour in the leg so moving the hip doesn’t move the foot?
We need the foot to be able to move in many ways - ball roll, toe roll, ankle rotation, etc..
Once this is set up, we'll add CTRL objects. This can be trickier than you might expect

Homework -- come back next week with
A fully rigged foot
Add another attribute to Luxo
If you are finding this all really easy, add a challenge by adding a look-at control or other fancy control.